


Crossroads

by mrsdaphnefielding



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - World War II, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 15:58:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1555973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsdaphnefielding/pseuds/mrsdaphnefielding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is dark underneath the city. </p><p>Next to Pavel, a woman steps up, willowy thin, black hair swept up. She’s pale in an elegant way, the kind of woman Myka would never have met if not for this war. She steps forward with reserve – Myka supposes that hesitation is not a trait that runs in her circles –, a suitcase clutched in both hands.</p><p>Myka looks at her and she knows she will lose that suitcase. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. By the time she makes it out of here, she’ll be lucky to own the skin on her back. And she’ll know it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for and posted to the mrsdaphnefielding Tumblr, spring/summer 2013

It is dark underneath the city.

Still, there’s enough light to see humidity glistening on the walls, and the occasional shadow scurrying past. Fog hangs above the rivulet to her feet, curling upwards to where streaks of gray light fall in. It has to be dusk up in the city. Down here, it is always dusk.

She doesn’t notice the stench any longer. She stands in the dark, and she waits. And somewhere out there is the river.

Why she does it, she couldn’t say. It’s not heroism, and it’s not the search for a kick. She has started by accident – one “please”, one desperate glance, one small hand clutched into a larger one – and now she doesn’t stop. It’s the right thing to do. Simple as that. She smokes against the fear.

The smoke of her cigarette blends into the fog as she waits and steps from one foot to the other. At this hour there are no searches, so this is when they do the transfers.

She picks them up and takes them along. Just a couple of hours. She knows the shift of the patrols, and then it’s onto the next helper. After that, it’s another station, another helper, and then another. And there are the lucky few who make it.

Now, there are steps echoing off the tunnel walls and two silhouettes appear out of the fog. It’s Pavel, or that’s what she calls him.

No names. That way you can give none up if they catch you.

Next to Pavel, a woman steps up, willowy thin, black hair swept up. She’s pale in an elegant way, the kind of woman Myka would never have met if not for this war. She steps forward with reserve – Myka supposes that hesitation is not a trait that runs in her circles –, a suitcase clutched in both hands.

Myka looks at her and she knows she will lose that suitcase. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. By the time she makes it out of here, she’ll be lucky to own the skin on her back. And she’ll know it.

The woman answers Myka’s gaze, evenly. Myka sees fear, but also determination. And something else, something that gives her pause. It’s in the lack of haste in the woman’s gaze, and it’s in the way she moves up next to her without a blink.

They start walking in silence as Pavel fades back into the fog.

Sometimes, they want to talk, hearts on their sleeve with fear, and Myka tells them to be quiet. Now she wishes that the woman would talk, but she doesn’t. She moves next to Myka, soundless like the fog.

There are large galleries with banisters and small tunnels where they have to duck their heads, and the woman doggedly holds onto her suitcase. When the rivulet to their feet broadens, Myka extends a hand to help her across into another tunnel. Usually she isn’t this gallant.

She looks down at the women’s feet, at the curve of an ankle, and hears the fine leather soles creak over a pebble or a piece of rock as the woman tries to regain her balance.

Myka pushes the cap she’s wearing – too many things dripping from above – back to her neck.

“You’ll ruin those shoes.”

The woman lets her gaze follows Myka’s. “Wearing others would have drawn suspicion.” When she raises her head again, Myka is transfixed by the curve of her jaw for a moment.

Absently, she nods. “True.”

“Once, I had boots for the mountains.” The woman doesn’t sound bitter, just wistful. “And heels to go dancing and shoes to play tennis…” She looks down her own body. “Not much left now.”

There’s that curve of jaw again. “We need to keep moving,” Myka urges.

Another set of tunnels, another gallery. Then, suddenly, flashlights.

“An unscheduled patrol!”

Before the woman can react, Myka has pulled her behind a boulder and pushed her up against the wall, one hand over her mouth. The suitcase gets caught awkwardly in between, jabbing into her body.

Legs splash through water, there’s the growl of a dog, and harsh voices yelling.

Myka’s every muscle is tense and alert, ready to pounce. The woman in her grasp has frozen, turning to stone, and Myka can barely feel her breath, quick and shallow. It’s the stupor of the hunted. This woman has never been prey, and she is only just learning how to run.

But right now, they can only wait, and not make a sound, and hope that the dogs won’t pick up their trail between the stench and the water.

If they get picked up, that’s the end, and Myka regrets that she hasn’t asked for the woman’s name. She would have liked to know it, as if adding it to a chest of treasures.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s an endless minutes before the patrol veers off into a tunnel to the side before ever reaching them, and Myka allows herself to slump in relief for a second.

“Damn, that was close.”

The woman remains frozen for long moments regardless and Myka can see that she has a death grip on her suitcase. Only then, the relief breaks through and they look at each other at the very short distance, with breathless, giddy smiles fueled by sheer adrenaline.

Then Myka steps back and clears her throat. “This way, come on.” She steers the woman away with a hand around her arm, and the familiarity of the gesture lasts well into the next tunnel they take.

The move through the maze for what seems to be hours, shoes soaked and shoulders aching. In the end, they take turns with the suitcase. And then they arrive.

It’s small, but it’s dry, a bit above ground level. Two big pillars cover the opening. There’s not even a door, just a makeshift shield of wooden boards to hide the little lamp that Myka lights now. It isn’t strong enough to display the shabbiness of the space. Instead, it makes the alcove look cozy.

There’s a worn metal bed frame crammed into a corner, there’s a table and two chairs, and boxes on a roughhewn shelf because anything that sits on the floor invites the rats.

“A break room for the workers, back then.” Myka explains. “They forgot to tear it down again. It’s not in the blueprints, that’s why it’s safe.” She hoists the woman’s suitcase up into the alcove and then gestures for her to step ahead and take a seat. “As safe as things can be these days.”

The woman tries to smile politely, and now that they are someplace dry and warm and Myka can see her face in the glow of the lamp, she notices the exhaustion fraying her features. It doesn’t take away from her beauty, though. For a moment, Myka gets lost in the bold arc of a brow, and then she is startled by the intensity of a dark brown gaze boring into her and she realizes too late that she has been caught staring.

She moves to put some food on the table between them. Dry bread, dried fruit. Condensed milk. Things you can keep down here.

“We might as well eat. Then we should try to get some rest. It’s another bit of a walk to the next transfer.”

The woman nods and despite her obvious exhaustion, her shoulders don’t slump. Myka watches how she nips at the sweet milk, somewhat gingerly. This one hasn’t gone hungry yet, not for long.

“Thank you,” the woman says suddenly.

Myka shrugs. “There’s no need.” Her cheeks feel a bit warm, though.

“You are risking your life,” the woman insists.

“At least I still have one to risk.” Myka reaches for a piece of dried fruit. She plops her elbow down on the table and it hobbles a bit on the uneven ground. It startles her company for the evening enough to lift her arms from the surface and look up, and Myka finds herself thinking that the woman has beautiful hands. Also, she wouldn’t mind looking into those dark, dark eyes for a while longer.

Something is happening, right here, and the woman is noticing it, too. She gives Myka a smile, more of a quirk of lips. “I am Helena.”

My all but groans. “Didn’t they explain to you that you aren’t supposed to give out your name?”

“Oh, they did,” the woman says easily.

_Helena_ , Myka’s brain supplies.

There’s a brief pause as they look at each other, across a dim lamp at a junction underneath the earth, somewhere deep in the night.

“I simply would like someone to remember it,” Helena finally says. “Someone like you.” She clearly knows that her chances to get out of all this are slim.

“There’ve got to be others,” Myka protests. She doesn’t want to carry this legacy, but the name already echoes through her mind. Helena. It suits her, elegant and archaic and sensual.

“My parents have already been deported.” Helena says in a carefully clipped tone. “My aunts, our friends… There is nobody left.” She is looking down at her hands. “I had a younger sister, Christina. She died before all this started, a mugging---” Helena bites her tongue. “I actually shouldn’t be here. I just got lucky because I was at work at the Department when they came to our house…”

“I am sorry,” Myka says, and she wishes she had something else to say. “So what’s your job?” She never asks questions. Helena looks at her, grateful for not speaking of her life in the past tense. Not yet. “I’m an Assistant Professor at the University.”

“Literature?” Myka guesses. She would have pegged for an artist, perhaps an actress.

“Engineering,” Helena replies, and she must be used to the surprise that now echoes through Myka’s expression. “I do like books, though.”

“So do I,” Myka says with genuine warmth. And she never talks about herself. “A lot.” Helena could be one of the women who come into her father’s bookstore for textbooks and special orders, one of the women Myka would have stared at across the rim of a heavy tome from behind the counter, cheeks burning and her mouth going dry. “What’s your favorite?”

“As if you could have just one,” Helena chides her, and there’s a it of a laugh that echoes off the narrow walls around them and settled on the worn furniture and makes it feel more like an actual room on an actual home.

And Helena talks. And Myka asks. And they speak of books and dreams, and the streets above and their favorite cafés, back when Helena was still allowed into all of them.

“We should get some rest,” Myka finally says, and she says it with regret. There is just one bed, and she has slept next to all kinds of different people already here. There’s no place for decorum on the run. But tonight, the bed seems smaller than usual, and much more inviting.

Myka pulls back the thin woolen blanket and she isn’t surprised when Helena’s fingers casually slide into her own. Oh, she would have stared at her in her father’s store.

Up there, it has to be nighttime, and something licks at Myka’s insides, burning claws and floating clouds and when she moves to dim the light, Helena is already there, and then Helena’s fingers cup her face and there is no hesitancy in her kiss. It’s hot and liquid and tastes of sweet condensed milk.

Myka lets the cap fall off her head and tips back her head to kiss Helena back. And to kiss her again, and again.

It’s not the first time Myka has said yes – the nights down here are quiet and so, so long, and in between the ever-present taste of fear and the hunger for life, people look for some warmth or a friendly face in the dark.

And Myka wants to think that this is all there is, to their kisses and to the fever in their touch, and in the breathless tenderness as clothes make room for hands, ready to not be afraid in the night any longer, at least for a few minutes, ready to disappear in the sensation of being alive because nobody knows what will come afterwards, in the woods and the cold or the dirtied floor of a blocked up train car.

And Helena is pale and beautiful, a tumble of hair, an embrace of strong, graceful limbs, and she wears nothing on her skin but a rectangular golden locket that rests against her skin.

“Lover’s photo?” Myka guesses, out of breath and curls of hair sticking to her temples.

“Someday, perhaps,” Helena teases. There’s something in her tone that tells Myka that there is more to it, and she hopes that she will have the chance to ask about it, one day.

It’s just another fugitive, and just another transfer, Myka tries to tell herself, and just two people in need of a warm hand and the chance to forget in between the fear and the cold, but she knows she is wrong. She knows it every time Helena’s eyes meet hers, so close to her own, unabashed and challenging and full of mirth at the sound of the bedsprings that they can feel through the thin mattress, but the only thing that matters is their skin.

And Myka wants to believe that this would have happened anyway: if Helena had walked into the bookstore, or if they had met in a café downtown – “is this seat taken?” – or if their eyes had met across the street. Or if Myka had walked by the posh tennis parlor and would have seen the ladies play in their short white skirts, and Helena would have had all kinds of shoes and Myka would have taken all of them off her, or perhaps some heels she would have refused to remove, sometimes.

Helena’s hands are on her skin, mapping her, writing herself into Myka’s body, and Myka believes that Helena would have looked at her, in another life. In every life.

Tonight, the stars are down here, and they move in spans of a lifetime, just for them. And they drink another ration of condensed milk, hungry and alive and giddily breathing in the hours that they have left.

At some point, Myka scrawls something on a piece of paper, a smiling face surrounded by wild curls, and folds it up. She hands it to Helena and it is a joke, or perhaps it isn’t, but Helena unclasps her locket and tucks the note in there.

And Myka blinks against the sting she feels at the back of her eyes, and Helena’s fingers slide into her own again, and the hours are ticking away.

Their breaths are visible in the bit of early light that echoes in here from far away, and Myka wants to think that they are simply huddling up against the cold, Helena cradled against her between her thighs, but they aren’t.

They don’t talk now, and all too soon it is time to leave.

They take terms with the suitcase again, their steps in tandem, lighter than yesterday, and Myka dreams of days beyond this war and the hunting and bloodshed, when they will both be able to walk the streets above again. And perhaps her father’s bookstore will still be standing, and perhaps Helena will walk into it, with an order for a thick volume on engineering. And Myka swears that she will be standing behind the counter.

Their next contact appears out of the shadows with nary a sound. He nods at Helena and takes her suitcase, but Helena waits for a moment longer and leans in to leave a lingering kiss at the corner of Myka’s mouth.

“Be safe,” she murmurs, and Myka know that she will never be able to forget these eyes.

“Good luck,” Myka says over a last fleeting brush of hands, and she never meant it as much.

The fog wraps around Helena and Myka is left standing alone.

She is still staring down the tunnel long after steps in shoes too thin for these sewers have disappeared.

 


	3. Chapter 3

In the dark, there’s an insistent, measured toc-toc-toc.

She’s nothing if not stubborn.

This is not a part of the official tour. There’s no grand monument down here, nothing that would warrant a prominent memorial stop.

But she is down here, and as her feet retrace the steps among the junctions, the fear is back, crawling up her spine and settling around her shoulders like the stench and the everlasting dusk that is now interrupted by a few lamps that throw worn brick walls into view.

She stops and leans onto her cane, looking around to orient herself.

“Are you sure this is quite alright, Ms. Wells?”

Helena looks at the young man next to her who shifts from one foot to the other.

“That’s Professor Wells to you, young lad,” she points out and by the way he straightens in response, she can tell that he hasn’t caught on to the amusement in her voice.

It’s been a long time since she has been just Helena.

Now, she has a nervous young tour guide who would clearly rather be someplace else, and she has already been interviewed for two documentaries today. She usually stays away from these anniversaries, thinking them pompous and static and at once too reserved and too dramatic to actually remember. This time, she has traveled over. This year, it is the anniversary of her own flight, down to the day.

“Hard to believe people hid down here,” her guide comments and he keeps looking around as if he is afraid of the rats pouncing on him.

“People hid anywhere.” Helena has started to walk again, following one tunnel with certainty now. Toc-toc-toc. She asked the tour guide for his name, but she has forgotten it again already. She supposes that she doesn’t care.

Once, a lifetime ago, there was a name she hasn’t asked for, a name to encompass green eyes, wild curls and a smile that could breathe warmth and a sense of home even into a lost alcove in the sewers.

Countless names she has tried over the years, tasting them on her tongue and then taking them off her again.

It has taken Helena years to find it. Petitions for documents, beneath the mantle of academia, in the name of research. Druschba may mean friendship, but not when you sent in your inquiries from Oxford.

But Helena is nothing if not stubborn.

Colleagues on congresses behind the Iron Curtain smuggled out grainy photocopies, long papers with tables and lists of names – helpers who made it, and helpers who died. And Helena tried on each name, tried it on for that one woman who served her condensed milk and asked her about books, and who had the softest lips and the most intense, compassionate gaze.

In the end, it was almost a byproduct. A little book, set up my another survivor, handwritten dates and a map of the paths through the sewers. Helena had leafed through it and rolled her eyes at the appendix, pretentious work of some meticulous scholar, but they had been meticulous enough to dig up photos. And there she was, so unexpectedly.

A small image of a young woman in front of a bookstore, the skirt of her dress pushed against her legs by a gist of wind, and her stance is the one of a person who is more comfortable wearing pants. She smiles a little self-consciously into the camera and it still makes Helena ache a little when she looks at it.

It’s not the jolt it used to be, the sudden rush and quickened heartbeat. She has stared at the photo so often that her reaction has mellowed over the years.

And it is black and white, but she remembers the exact shade of green those eyes had.

“This is it.”

It’s the alcove and, thankfully, someone has thought to put a stepladder in front of it. Helena is not above ordering her guide to lift her up, but she prefers to walk here on her own.

She squeezes past the two boulders and stands inside the alcove.

“This, huh?” Next to her, the guide appears with a bright flashlight and a skeptical expression.

The walls look sad and dirty in the cone of light. The space is smaller than she remembers it, even though it is devoid of furniture now. There are scraps of paper on the floor, and perhaps fabric. Two rusty meal bars lay in a corner and Helena thinks that perhaps they might have been part of a bedframe sixty years ago.

She holds up her flashlight and where once she wore a suitcase with stubborn ease, now a sturdy flashlight feels heavy already. Helena blinks at the ceiling, wondering whether it was always that low, and she lets her hand sink, inexplicably annoyed with the frailty of old age.

Like this, the alcove looks oppressive, with walls blacked by mould and soot, but Helena remembers it as a place of hope, bright enough to see the stars beneath the earth.

In the circle of light wandering along the wall, Helena can see that she isn’t the first one who came. There are pictures pinned to the wall, names and words of thanks scrawled onto the bricks. To her feet, a wilted flower is fouling away in a puddle of dingy water.

Behind her, the tour guide is shifting uncomfortably. But it takes just one look, and he stops and steps outside to wait, as if there were a door and not just an opening in the wall. Helena has paid him well for this little excursion, and she would have paid him even more for this moment alone, in here.

She looks at the rusty metal bars again and when she closes her eyes, she can feel a hand in her own underneath a rough blanket.

Helena takes a deep breath and walks up to the wall to pin up a small black-and-white photo. It is a copy from a book, complete with the page number and the caption.

_Myka Bering, flight helper. Shot down in April ‘45 while helping two men escape through the sewers._

“Thank you.” Helena’s voice sounds hollow against the walls, but she is smiling now. And then she is finally giving her back her name, after all these years, down here. “Thank you, Myka.”

She reaches around her neck, tired bones protesting, and removes a thin golden chain bearing a locket. It holds two photos, one of her parents and one of her younger sister. And a brittle piece of paper: a smile, a pair of eyes and a tumble of hair, hastily sketched. Helena has always thought of it as a promise. A promise of years to turn this sketch into a detailed painting, fleshed out with every eyelash, and every wrinkle gained from shared laughter.

Helena doesn’t open the locket now, she has done so enough times. She hesitates for a few seconds, then she pushes it between two broken bricks and hears it trickle down deep into the wall, to bear witness to another time. Her hand hovers over the wall briefly, but then she nods and walks away, towards the tunnel, where the silhouette of her guide is waiting.

She doesn’t turn around again.

 

 


End file.
